“Town line is at the Forty-One intersection,” Troy said. “Another mile east. You poaching on me?”
“Nah. Sheriff's got the call because the truck driver didn't know any better. Your turf, your case. I did call the M.E. and tell them to send someone.”
“Appreciate that.”
They walked over to the edge of the embankment. Both men stared down at what was left of Michaels. It wasn't a pretty sight. A Suburban with “Mangrove Bayou Police” on the side came up the road, pulled in to park and its emergency lights went on. Tom VanDyke got out. He walked over to join them. “Damn,” he said, looking down into the canal. “That's justâ¦nasty.”
“Reckon he's been chewed on. A lot,” Rivers said.
“Going to be a long afternoon,” Troy said. “Hope you had a big lunch.”
Rivers looked up as distant sirens sounded. Soon they saw a county fire rescue truck, another sheriff's cruiser, and a plain sedan coming toward them.
“Looks like you called the entire cavalry,” Troy said.
“Maybe we can order some pizzas and beer,” Rivers said. “Make it a complete evening.”
Tom VanDyke stared at Rivers and back at the body and looked a little green around the gills. Troy stifled a smile.
Joe Bronson, the other deputy Troy had met at the Collier River bridge, got out of the sheriff's car. The Collier County medical examiner got out of the plain sedan. She was about fifty and a pudgy five feet, six inches, with black hair worn up in a bun, and brown eyes. She wore a black short-sleeved shirt and black overalls. On her sockless feet she had on some blue Crocs plastic shoes. “Alicia Sydney,” she said, holding out a hand. “You the new guy I heard about?”
“Troy Adam. What did you hear?”
“Heard that even after I signed off on John Barrymore as accidental electrocution you refused to stop investigating it as a murder. That sort of pisses me off.”
“Well, pleasure to meet you too. It wasn't personal. I think he was murdered. You don't. Time will tell.”
“Yeah. Right. So what do we have here?” She walked over and looked down into the canal. She seemed as emotionally shaken by what she saw as Lester Groud might have been looking at a too-small snook he had caught.
“This might take a while,” she said. “You got pictures yet?”
“Tom, get pictures,” Troy said.
“Geez. I gotta get down in that?”
“Yep. And try not to mess up the department truck when you get back in. Just washed it and it's got to go another week before the next wash.”
They waited while Tom did his photography, mostly using a telephoto lens. Troy let him; the pictures weren't that important. When Tom was done Alicia Sydney took some latex gloves from a pocket of the overalls and, without further ado, climbed down the bank and into the canal. She pulled the body closer to the bank and crouched down in water knee-deep and poked and prodded at fleshy parts of what had once been a person. “Lotta tattoos on this guy,” she called out. “OK. Seen enough. Take him out.”
The stench was overpowering, but everyone but Tom had worked with that before and they didn't comment on it. There was a rope tied around the body under the armpits and running through the two holes in a standard concrete block. They untied the rope and block and laid that aside. There was a hole in the right side of the head above the ear and most of the left side of the skull was missing. They got most of the body up the bank and laid it in an open body bag. Tom photographed everything as they did all this.
They managed to get the body bag up onto a gurney. They fished up some smaller pieces from the canal and put those into the bag too. They never found his right leg. Alicia Sydney was wearing black shorts under her overalls. She stripped to the shorts, walked across the road and washed off her overalls in the canal on the other side. Suddenly Troy saw why the plastic Crocs shoes were her preferred footwear. They washed off perfectly clean.
Rivers grimaced and pulled a wallet out of the rear pocket of pants which were bulged out from the swollen body. “Jarvess Michaels,” he said.
“Alias âTats,' and owner of that truck you found up by the Collier River bridge,” Troy said. “Tom, bag that wallet.”
“Good enough,” Sydney said. “Let's get back to the office.” She looked at Troy. “This guy actually
was
murdered. You can work on that. I'll do him this afternoon and prelims emailed to you tomorrow.”
“We never sleep at the M.E.'s office,” Troy said.
Sydney didn't answer. She got into her car and drove off. The county fire rescue guys shoved the gurney into the truck and followed, rolling down their windows as they left.
Troy and Rivers walked the sandy berm for a hundred yards in either direction. Tom VanDyke and Joe Bronson looked around where the body had been. There was some glass in the lane closest to the body, probably from the driver's side window of Michaels' truck, Troy suspected. There would be traces of blood on some of the pieces if that were true. Tom found a small round hole about six inches deep beside the road. Joe turned out to be one of the sheriff's department divers and he stripped down and put on a wet suit and went snorkeling up and down the canal for fifty yards each way, looking for clues. Kyle, Tom and Troy walked back and forth above, their guns drawn, watching out for alligators or moccasins. Joe found nothing but a short piece of PVC pipe. “Don't imagine it's got anything to do with this,” he said as he toweled off and changed back into his uniform.
“Au contraire,”
Troy said. He walked back to the edge of the road. “Tom, photograph this little hole.” Tom stepped forward and did so. “Now, watch.” He carefully fitted the pipe into the hole. “Marker,” he said. “Tom, do the pipe and the hole.”
“Be nice to find a gun,” Rivers said. “But, with no bullet, wouldn't prove much.”
“True,” Troy said. “Sometimes bullets break up going through skulls. But not that one.”
“Why would you need a marker?” Tom asked as he stowed the pipe, the concrete block and the rope in his truck.
“Shows where you stashed the block and rope,” Troy said. “Climb into someone's truck with a concrete block and a rope and that might raise questions. But make up some excuse to stop where you've stashed them and you're in business.”
Kyle Rivers was looking across the road at the marsh grass beyond. “We didn't find any shell casing in the truck, and none here. So the shooter either picked up after himself or used a revolver. And if Michaels was shot, looks like the bullet went on through his head and also the window. It'll be out there someplace.”
“Never find it,” Troy said.
“And guns are hard to find in the marsh,” Rivers said. “A man could heave one fifty yards out there, and then it sinks into several feet of muck.”
“And who is to say the shooter gave it the heave-ho right here?” Troy said. “Could have tossed it anywhere within fifty miles of here.”
Rivers nodded. “So you got a theory of the crime?”
“Sure. Michaels stops here next to this PVC pipe marker. He's stashed a concrete block and rope here too. He shoots himself in the head. He throws the gun way out there somewhere. He drives on up to the U.S. 41 intersection, turns left, drives a few more miles to the Collier River bridge. He squeezes his truck between the end of the bridge rail and the guard rail on the road. He runs the truck into the canal, where he mistakenly thinks it will sink out of sight. It doesn't, but there's not much he can do about it at that point. He hops onto a bicycle he's stashed there and rides back down here. He ties the block around his middle and jumps into the canal here. He assumes the gators will eat him right up and he doesn't realize that one block won't hold a body down once the gas starts in the abdomen.”
“Where's the bicycle?” Rivers said. He turned to Joe Bronson. “You see a bicycle while you were fishing around down there?”
Bronson looked from Rivers to Troy. “You two are crazy.”
“Yeah, we are,” Rivers said. “But if you assume
two
people, his scenario isn't all that bad. We can build on it.”
“And we do assume two people,” Troy said, “seeing as how most people don't function all that well with only half a brain left in their skull.”
Rivers grinned. “You've not been to any of our County Commission meetings, have you?”
Chapter 29
Sunday, July 28
“You win,” the man said. “I don't really want to do this.” He took away the knife. He let the woman go. And Troy's Glock went off and killed him.
Troy jerked awake, confused. He was in a strange place. No, not so strange now. He smelled perfume. The sheets were better than his, the room larger. He jumped up and made it to the bathroom's toilet closet just in time. He vomited only once this time and drank some tap water before leaving the bathroom.
He had spent late Saturday afternoon shopping and then shown up at Lee Bell's door carrying one bottle of Champagne, one of a Merlot, neither of which he would drink, some sparkling water for himself, a corny greeting card he had seen on the rack in the Publix, and several three-packs of condoms because he was an optimistic guy. He felt eighteen years old and a little scared. It was a rare sensation for him and he tried to make it last.
Lee had drunk most of the Merlot, saved the Champagne for another time, cooked them both some steaks on an outdoor grill, and then served up some decaf coffee that Troy detested but drank happily.
At about ten o'clock he had looked at the table and the dirty plates and at the door to the kitchen. “What's for dessert?” he had asked.
“Me.” Lee reached out to take his hand, pulled him to his feet, and led him into her bedroom.
“Oh,” Troy had said. And that was that.
Now, in the faint glow from a nightlight in a wall socket he looked around at Lee Bell's bedroom. Furniture was minimal throughout Lee's house. Here, on either side of a king-sized bed there were large nightstands. A glass-topped table with two chairs was beyond the foot of the bed, next to the French doors. There was a door to the dressing room and, through that, the bathroom. The French doors opened onto a small pool and the back lawn which ran several hundred feet down to the Collier River. The curtains were drawn and he couldn't see the streetlights of Barron Key beyond the river.
He climbed back into bed. Lee murmured next to him, then rolled over on one elbow to look at him.
“You were sort of shouting. Bad dream?”
“You have no idea.” Troy told Lee about his nightmares. It took some time. He turned on a light on his nightstand.
“And they happen often?” Lee asked.
“Every few days. Not sure what triggers them on those particular nights.”
“Always the same dream?”
“Yes. Always the man, the woman, the knife. The gun going off.”
“When this really happened, did the gun justâ¦go off?”
“No. I pulled the trigger. Guns don't just go off. In fact a Glock has one safety right in the trigger itself. I could turn it around and use it to pound a nail with and it wouldn't fire. Has to have a finger on the trigger and the finger has to be squeezing that trigger.”
“Do you think that man was really going to kill that woman? That you saved her life at the last second?”
“I did then. I'm not so sure about it now. Maybe I'm starting to believe the dream. Dream something often enough, over and over, and it starts to become the perceived reality. In the dream the man always takes the knife away, starts to relax. But that wasn't how I saw it at the time.”
“That's not the incident that got you fired, is it?”
“No, it was not. Oddly, I never seem to dream about shooting that teenage kid who had the water pistol. That was what got me fired.”
“You didn't know it was a water pistol.”
“Looked real enough. And pointing something at a policeman when he thinks you're armed is a good way to get shot. Any number of people get shot every year because they were holding a cell phone or just reaching for their wallets. It's always bad when that happens and it's almost always the fault of a scared cop. But it does happen.”
“How are you expected to know a large black water pistol from the real thing?”
“Good question. Toy guns that otherwise look real are supposed to be marked, usually with a red or orange plastic thing on the front of the barrel. But those are easy to remove. If toy makers were serious, the red markers would be built onto the toy and not removable. Better yet, stop making them look like real guns at all. Make them entirely out of yellow plastic.”
“So that boy died because toy makers didn't take seriously law enforcement's wanting less-realistic toys?”
Troy shook his head. “That kid's dead because I blew him away. Could I have waited a second to see what he was going to do? Sure. And if he'd had a real gun
I'd
be dead now.”
“So why fire you over that? What choice did you have?”